A photographer-friend was showing me some of the shots that he was taking with an old Polaroid 350 Land Camera (circa 1970) and I just had to rush out and acquire one of my own. It took me a few packs of film to grasp how the camera works (including how to load the huge film packs) and how to gain control of the images that I was producing, but I finally got the knack and I’m loving this thing. I’ve been carrying it around with me for the past two weeks and snapping photos here and there. I also took the camera on my road trip to Arizona and was able to convince one of the models that I was shooting to let me photograph her with it.

I scanned a few of my favorite prints and included them below. You’ll notice some subtle differences in the representation of colors, which is from my experimentation with different film types. I know that this is a little different, so I am anxious to hear what people who like my other work think of them.

Priscilla in Arizona

A Day in Santa Monica

LA Grass and Whatnot

Mia and I took a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and wound up snapping a few shots around her beautiful campus. I took one shot specifically to play around with in Photoshop using the tilt-shift mimicking technique that I mentioned in a previous post. Basically, by manipulating the areas of focus within the image, it seems more like a miniature scale model rather than the real thing.

After getting a few requests to see the original, I included it below. Believe it or not, I didn’t touch the sky in this image. It was really that gorgeous up in Malibu that day.

Pepperdine University Campus

Tilt Shift Experiment

And of course, a recent restaurant that I need to recommend*:

Turner New Zealand (Costa Mesa, CA)- If you a can appreciate a good steak and are in Orange County, CA, you should definitely check this place out. They serve all-natural, hormone-free meats & seafood from New Zealand. An extensive wine list and friendly staff. I had the fillet and found it hard to believe that it was only seasoned with organic sea salt and pepper, as the flavor was amazing. (thanks for the recommendation, Scott!) At the time of this post, their website was experiencing uptime issues, so here is an alternate link to a review of the establishment.

* BTW: you can use the SEARCH function above to find past recommendations in your local area. Just type “restaurant” and your city.

One of my facebook contacts forwarded me a link to an interesting photoshop article that had me digging through my image archive for a suitable photo to experiment with. Photoshop is great…no matter how much I think that I know, there is always something new that can be done with the application.

This article discussed tilt-shift photography, which uses the Scheimpflug principal to obscure the focal plane of the image relative to the camera. It seems that a photoshop technique can be applied, with a little finesse, to gain an effect similar to that created with a Tilt-Shift Lens. The resulting image can actually trick the eye and look like a miniature model as opposed to a real scene. I used an image that I snapped of a town on the Tambopata River in Peru and applied the technique.

So…what do you think? Does Puerto Maldonado look real or more like a miniature scale model?

I’m already looking for some interesting vantage points to shoot Playa Del Rey, CA and experiment further with this technique. More to come soon…